Plug it and Play on Logs: A Configuration-Free Statistic-Based Log Parser

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Qin, Qiaolin, Wu, Xingfang, Li, Heng, Merlo, Ettore
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Qin, Qiaolin
Wu, Xingfang
Li, Heng
Merlo, Ettore
author_facet Qin, Qiaolin
Wu, Xingfang
Li, Heng
Merlo, Ettore
contents Log parsing is an essential task in log analysis, and many tools have been designed to accomplish it. Existing log parsers can be categorized into statistic-based and semantic-based approaches. In comparison to semantic-based parsers, existing statistic-based parsers tend to be more efficient, require lower computational costs, and be more privacy-preserving thanks to on-premise deployment, but often fall short in their accuracy (e.g., grouping or parsing accuracy) and generalizability. Therefore, it became a common belief that statistic-based parsers cannot be as effective as semantic-based parsers since the latter could take advantage of external knowledge supported by pretrained language models. Our work, however, challenges this belief with a novel statistic-based parser, PIPLUP. PIPLUP eliminates the pre-assumption of the position of constant tokens for log grouping and relies on data-insensitive parameters to overcome the generalizability challenge, allowing "plug and play" on given log files. According to our experiments on an open-sourced large log dataset, PIPLUP shows promising accuracy and generalizability with the data-insensitive default parameter set. PIPLUP not only outperforms the state-of-the-art statistic-based log parsers, Drain and its variants, but also obtains a competitive performance compared to the best unsupervised semantic-based log parser (i.e., LUNAR). Further, PIPLUP exhibits low time consumption without GPU acceleration and external API usage; our simple, efficient, and effective approach makes it more practical in real-world adoptions, especially when costs and privacy are of major concerns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09366
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Plug it and Play on Logs: A Configuration-Free Statistic-Based Log Parser
Qin, Qiaolin
Wu, Xingfang
Li, Heng
Merlo, Ettore
Software Engineering
D.2.5
Log parsing is an essential task in log analysis, and many tools have been designed to accomplish it. Existing log parsers can be categorized into statistic-based and semantic-based approaches. In comparison to semantic-based parsers, existing statistic-based parsers tend to be more efficient, require lower computational costs, and be more privacy-preserving thanks to on-premise deployment, but often fall short in their accuracy (e.g., grouping or parsing accuracy) and generalizability. Therefore, it became a common belief that statistic-based parsers cannot be as effective as semantic-based parsers since the latter could take advantage of external knowledge supported by pretrained language models. Our work, however, challenges this belief with a novel statistic-based parser, PIPLUP. PIPLUP eliminates the pre-assumption of the position of constant tokens for log grouping and relies on data-insensitive parameters to overcome the generalizability challenge, allowing "plug and play" on given log files. According to our experiments on an open-sourced large log dataset, PIPLUP shows promising accuracy and generalizability with the data-insensitive default parameter set. PIPLUP not only outperforms the state-of-the-art statistic-based log parsers, Drain and its variants, but also obtains a competitive performance compared to the best unsupervised semantic-based log parser (i.e., LUNAR). Further, PIPLUP exhibits low time consumption without GPU acceleration and external API usage; our simple, efficient, and effective approach makes it more practical in real-world adoptions, especially when costs and privacy are of major concerns.
title Plug it and Play on Logs: A Configuration-Free Statistic-Based Log Parser
topic Software Engineering
D.2.5
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09366